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It’s here… It’s working… It’s cool. The block came in today, and it was a pretty good fit. There was only a slight modification needed.

As you can see I had to grind out a place for the capacitor on the bottom. I also ground out a channel on the top of the block to fit around a coil. Something I took for granted though… the wire on the coil was NOT insulated, creating an interference issue when it touched the water block copper plate. When i powered up the modem the first time it errored out. I inserted a piece of plastic between them, fire it back up and all was good. I used thermal epoxy to attach the water block btw. There’s no good way to clamp it down effectively, and I have had good success in the past using it on north bridge/south bridge chips.

I punched a couple holes in the top of the dsl case like I planned, but unfortunately the block is just slightly too tall.

It looks ok… But I may end up just cutting a hole for the entire water block to poke through. Not too worried about it right now.

The modem now runs icy cold… just the way it should be. No more modem over heating for me!!!

I’ve been dealing with cooling issues for years in my home office. Air cooling works fine as long as the local room temp is cool, and relatively dust free. Thats fine in the winter… when the fireplace isn’t going. Obviously… thats a very narrow window here. My fans clog with dirt which makes everything even worse. I find myself doing full tear downs of my heat sinks once a month to keep things going.

To make things worse, I just about burned up another DSL modem. The damn things run too hot anyways, and my environment here makes it even worse.

Last week i decided to modify my cooling design and go with water cooling. It much simpler to vacuum out a single radiator than digging around in my case with an oversized static wand. Not to mention its much quieter than before.

What about my DSL modem? I stuck a couple ram heat sinks on the processor, but its still running way too hot for my comfort. I was thinking about going with a bigger heat sink… maybe with a fan on it but that create new problems. The case is already small, and a larger heat sink would mean cutting a hole in the top of the case. Ventilation isn’t the problem, as I currently have the case removed, and its still over heating.

Thats when the lightbulb came on. Why not water cool that as well? A small chipset water block looks like it would work well. The fittings would end up coming right out the top of the case, making hooks-up very simple and straight forward. I’m thinking a 1/4 feed would work perfectly. I’m working on a parts list, and will update as the project progresses.